[CentOS] kickstart problems

Wed Sep 3 22:20:45 UTC 2008
Paolo Supino <paolo.supino at gmail.com>

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Joseph L. Casale <JCasale at activenetwerx.com
> wrote:

> >This is a VERY common problem. I see it all the time.
>
> I also can confirm this *very* typical behavior.
>
> Paolo,
> Remind me what the issue is that prevents you from working through
> this based on the known existence? Its been muddied somewhere through
> the thread...
>
> jlc
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

  Hi Joseph

  Here is my original post:
  I'm having a problem with setting up a kickstart environment based on
CentOS 5.2 x86_64, on a Sun X2200 M2 server (both the server and the client
in the kickstart environment are Sun X2200 M2 systems): the first attempt to
load stage2.img fails with the error screen: "unable to retrieve
http://192.168.11.1/source/images/stage2.img<http://192.168.11.10/source/images/stage2.img>".
Pressing the "OK" button brings up the "HTTP Setup"  screen with "Website
name: 192.168.11.1 <http://192.168.11.10/>" and "CentOS directory: /source"
if I press OK it successfully loads stage2.img file and continues with the
kickstart installation to a successful completion.
I checked the apache logs on 192.168.11.1 <http://192.168.11.10/> and there
is no attempt by the client to even load stage2.img before it prompts for
the error.
  Has anyone encounter this problem and has a solution for it?

  A few more things I learned since the post: sniffing the network showed
that no traffic is received on the server from the requesting client prior
to me pressing the 'OK' button in the HTTP setup window. What more I don't
think that Linux (or in this case anaconda) will remap ETH devices to NICs
on the same run (which is what is described above).
2 more things I found working on the problem during the thread exchange: 1 -
eth0 network statement didn't have '--onboot yes' directive. 2 - While PXE
was Telling the kernel to autoconfigure eth0. The kickstart configuration
file was telling it configure eth0 statically. These 2 issues have been
fixed but I still see this happening sporadically. In one of my attempts I
did instruct PXE to pass static IP configuration to the kernel, but that
worsened the problem and the clients failed to get the kickstart file
altogether.

My configuration files are as follows:
pxe (for node3):
default ks
prompt 0
label ks
        kernel vmlinuz
        append initrd=initrd.img ramdisk_size=9216 ksdevice=bootif noapic
acpi=off ks=http://192.168.11.1/kickstart/n03.ks
        ipappend 2

kickstart file (for node3):
# Kickstart file automatically generated by anaconda.

install
lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
network --device eth0 --onboot yes --bootproto dhcp --hostname
n003.example.com
network --device eth1 --onboot no --bootproto dhcp --hostname
n003.example.com
network --device eth2 --onboot no --bootproto dhcp --hostname
n003.example.com
network --device eth3 --onboot no --bootproto dhcp --hostname
n003.example.com
url --url http://192.168.11.1/source
rootpw --iscrypted ?????????????????????????????????
firewall --disabled
authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5
selinux --disabled
timezone --utc Asia/Jerusalem
bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=sda --append="noapic acpi=off"
# The following is the partition information you requested
# Note that any partitions you deleted are not expressed
# here so unless you clear all partitions first, this is
# not guaranteed to work
zerombr
clearpart --all --drives=sda
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=sda
part pv.2 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=sda
volgroup VolGroup00 --pesize=32768 pv.2
.
.
.



--
ttyl
Paolo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080904/496ba749/attachment-0005.html>